A Changing of the Guards

Or, more appropriately a changing of instructors. When my clinical instructor and MGH West told me that she had been called for grand jury duty, I just knew that with my luck she would be chosen. Sure enough on Oct 10th she was picked for a 3 month term that mandated her to review cases in Cambridge, Lowell and Natick 3-4 days a week to determine, along with 22 others, if enough evidence existed to go to trial.

That was almost 2 weeks ago, and things have been gradually settling out at work. The plan is to transition me over to Aaron, a staff therapist who has been with MGH for over 5 years and has worked in both inpatient and outpatient settings. The problem with that right now is that Aaron has a full caseload and it will take a few weeks to transition some of his patients over to other therapists and/or to me, and to get my patients on his schedule. I've had to delegate a few of my favorite patients to Angela (my former CI) as she can see them once a week on Fridays when she is not at jury duty. This was done to free up my schedule to begin to take on new patients with Aaron. I've already moved to Aaron's schedule, which is MW 7-6:30, TFr 7-4:30 and Thursdays off. I've only had that schedule for a week, but it'll be interesting to see if I have the stamina for the longer days. Good thing I'm an endurance athlete, huh?

I guess the best part of this situation is that I get to work with a senior therapist who specializes in Spine in the interim. She has 30+ years experience and watching her work is amazing. She has different teaching approach that is more hands on that I am used to, but her intent is to give me words of wisdom for approaches, techniques and rationales that took her 5 or more years to develop and allow me to build from that.

We'll see how this all turns out.... 5 weeks down, 47 to go!